Rise and Fall
by CharlotteBlackwood
Summary: Another Remus Smutshot! Mary MacDonald and Remus Lupin are study partners. Remus hesitates to make it anything more. Could his hesitation be founded, or is he taking too much credit? RL/MarMac


**A/N:** **Another Remus Smutshot for your reading pleasure. If you're interested in reading all of them, or if you missed the last one, it was Marietta Edgecomb. This is, if you didn't check to see already, Mary MacDonald. I was surprised to find that nobody had paired him with Mary, especially after he'd been paired with Marlene. BUT I suppose people pair him with Mary, just not in stories that focus on that relationship. I've seen it in Sirius/OC's plenty. SO I'M DOING IT HERE! I hope you enjoy, review, and go read more of my stuff!**

** -C**

Remus and Mary had been study partners for Muggle Studies since third year. Sirius and James always worked together, if they worked at all, and Lily hadn't felt that Muggle Studies was a useful class to spend a slot in her tight timetable on. So that left Remus and Mary alone to work together on their essays and revision.

"So," she sighed, rubbing her temples after three hours revising for the N.E.W.T.s for the fifth Friday in a row. "Who's the Prime Minister, again?"

Remus groaned, burying his face in his hands.

"I've got no bloody clue," he growled. "I know who the queen is, though, if that counts."

"I don't think it does," she said with a sympathetic smile. "I have a feeling they'd mark you down if you tried that on the N.E.W.T.s. Well, if it makes it any better, I don't remember who the Prime Minister is, either."

"Right," Remus sighed, marking it down on their list of things to focus on the following Friday.

It was getting so close to the full moon, but Remus needed every minute he could get to study, especially knowing he would lose more than a day being in the Shack for the transformation and recovery.

"Remus," Mary said softly, reaching out to touch his cheek gently. "You look so tired."

"So do you," he said weakly, finding himself leaning into her touch without even thinking about it. Had her hands always been so soft and graceful? The warmth of her palm, her fingertips, lingered on his skin and he wondered if the rest of her skin was so warm and pleasantly soft. He nearly asked her, but as he opened his mouth and a small moan escaped his lips he realized what he was doing and he jerked away from her hand abruptly.

Mary was a sweet girl, but she didn't know about him. If she did, she wouldn't have touched him so gently.

"Remus," she said softly, almost pleadingly. "I... I'm sorry. I shouldn't have... I..."

She looked so sweet, so embarrassed, that he felt terrible for moving away from her touch.

...Or was it because he felt a bit emptier without her hand on his skin?

"You were fine, Mary," he tried to assure her. "I... I was being inappropriate and-"

"What?" she gasped. "N-no. I... I know inappropriate, Remus. You're forgetting I've been with Sirius. You're not even close to inappropriate. You never are."

How could he have forgotten the brief fling between Mary and Sirius the year before? Once he'd been reminded, Remus was torn between jealous and a desire to cling to a tangible excuse he could give her not to succumb to the desire to reach out and see if her cheek was as soft as her fingers. Sure, there wasn't anything in the code about going out with other Marauder's exes, because if there were, nobody but Sirius would ever get to date anyone worth looking at twice, but Remus could make something up that seemed plausible.

It was better than telling her the truth.

He was trying to think of a way to say it so that she might believe him, but before he'd gotten his thoughts together, her lips came crashing into his, her soft fingers on his cheek once more.

He should have been pulling away. He shouldn't have let her kiss him like that. But her lips were even softer than her fingertips and they were so warm and yielding, and when she opened them slightly he could taste her breath and realized that her mouth tasted sweet and inviting.

And somehow, he couldn't make himself stop kissing her.

His lips took up the cause of their own accord and he kissed her back with vigor, glad that they'd made a habit of studying in an empty classroom rather than in the library. His fingers were getting tangled up in her hair somehow and her fingers were undoing the buttons of his shirt.

Why were they doing that?

But her tongue touched his and he found himself rather not caring whether she stripped him down to his skin or not. Which was precisely what she ended up doing, and he found that his own hands had been slipping her own clothes off her body without his brain fully comprehending it.

The teacher's desk couldn't be terribly comfortably, but Mary didn't seem to mind as she sat down on the edge of it, pulling Remus close to her and molding their lips together again, their bodies sharing warmth, their skin on each other's skin, and he couldn't hardly think anymore, except for about how perfect it felt, her fingers tracing his scars and his hands exploring the silky expanse of her body.

How was it possible for one person to be so soft?

She began leaning back onto the desk, pulling him down on top of her. Remus couldn't find it in him to pull back from her, to deny either of them what their bodies were very obviously aching for.

Remus had never been with anyone, but he understood the general idea, especially with Sirius's stories of his many exploits, 'educating' the other Marauders in the ways of carnal behaviors. These bits of advice ran through Remus's mind as he let the advice and instinct take over. Her breasts looked inviting, so he sucked and nibbled at her nipples, cupped them and enjoyed the weight of them in his hands. He wanted to touch her between her legs, so he did, and he was encouraged by the moan she let out when he did so.

It had to mean he was doing something right. Nothing could sound so good and mean anything else.

He explored the warm, wet folds that Sirius had described dozens of times. They were different on every girl, Remus knew. But there were things that they all enjoyed, according to Sirius, so Remus ran his fingers along the folds gently, noticing that she shivered and sighed slightly. There was a small nub at the top that he knew was a good thing to pay attention to, but gently Sirius had said.

Somehow he'd gone from pleasuring her to wildly thrusting into her, and Remus couldn't quite recall how he got from point A to point B, but he certainly didn't have any complaints about the feelings point B was causing in him.

They finished faster than he thought, but when he looked at his watch while they were dressing he was surprised that the curfew had been long past.

"I have to go patrol," he sighed, kissing her deeply, feeling a seed of guilt in his gut for what he'd not told her. "I'll see you tomorrow."

He hurried off to patrol, and found himself struggling to keep his mind on anything but the way he'd felt with Mary. Under different circumstances he would have wanted to walk back to the common room with her, maybe kiss her some more before saying good night, but he didn't want Professor McGonagall to find that he hadn't patrolled, especially after the prank he'd let Sirius, James, and Peter pull during his patrol the week before.

He'd nearly finished his route when he heard a scream echoing through the corridor. Remus ran as fast as he could toward the sound.

It was Lily screaming, he processed that part first. Lily was screaming, collapsed to her knees in the middle of the corridor, screaming and sobbing and looking at the middle of the corridor in horror.

Remus looked where she was looking, but it took his brain several moments to piece together what he was looking at, and once he had he wished he'd not looked.

There was a chair. That was the first part he understood. A chair in the middle of the corridor that was probably from a nearby classroom, and it looked so out of place there in the stone hall.

There was someone in the chair.

A girl.

A girl he knew, recognized.

It was Mary, he realized. Mary was sitting in that chair.

Well, it was more slumped than sitting, slumped, with her head tilted back slightly, eyes staring up at the ceiling glassily, and there was something wrong.

Something was very wrong.

Her throat, there was a cut, a large cut, and blood was dripping down it, onto the white shirt of her uniform.

Remus could feel his stomach churning as he looked to her forehead and saw that there were cuts there as well, cuts that were words.

"Mudblood Whore."

Whoever had done this couldn't even spare her beautiful face.

"Dead," Lily sobbed, and the word sank in, impressing Remus with its heaviness and how all of it seemed to settle in his chest. "How can she be dead?"

Mary MacDonald was dead.

And somehow, Remus felt it was all his fault.

Except he knew it wasn't. This was a product of the war, but he would spend the rest of his life feeling guilty for leaving her alone. He would spend the rest of his life mourning her.


End file.
